A Sample of Straight Boy/Queer Girl: a memoir

Here's a sample of my recent book that is available on kindle. By contract I can't give away a larger sample. 

Chapter 1

I was probably four, so my younger brother, Alex, was probably two. The two of us were waiting in the lobby of a free clinic for a dentist appointment, or a doctor's appointment, I'm not sure which. We sat on the floor. My mother sat above us in a cheap plastic bucket seat. I was playing with a doll whose name was “Me Me.” I tried to get my brother to play with it also, but he wasn't interested and started rolling a toy truck back and forth on the tile floor instead.

“Dummy” I called him.

“Don't call your brother that!” my mom said.

I looked up at her. “Why?” I asked.

“Because it's not nice,” she said.

I picked myself off the floor and sat beside my mother. “But he doesn't even know how to play with Me Me,” I said showing her the doll. It was a strange doll, a cross between a stuffed animal and a person.

“Well,” she said, “he's younger than you. He doesn't know how to play with those types of toys yet. They take more imagination.” My brother continued to roll the truck around on the floor, back and forth. He picked up a block and put it on the truck. “Maybe you could teach him how to build with blocks,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said, “They're boring.”

My earliest memories are from the time just before my brother was born. I had just turned two. I lived with my parents in a rental house that was clad with wood and painted white. It was hot outside, some time in the late summer. I ran in front of my parents, out the back door, down the concrete steps, and across our grassy, but treeless yard to our next door neighbor's house. She was an old lady in her eighties who gave me candies whenever we visited. I liked visiting her, but I hated our backyard. I ran across it as quickly as I could to get out of the sun.

My mother was pregnant. I understood what that meant and hoped for a sister. Instead my brother was born. I remember my mother sitting with us on the living room floor, breast feeding my brother. “He's the baby and needs milk,” she said. “You can eat real food.” I sat a few feet away and watched. “This is how mommies feed their babies,” she said.

“Like cows?” I asked.

We moved into the farmhouse where I grew up as a hurricane approached. I sat upstairs in my bedroom next to a trunk of toys. Two girls a couple years older than me who had been my playmates were over to say goodbye. They gave me a wiffle ball. It had holes all over it. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do with it. I looked at it.

One of the girls picked the ball up, tossed it in the air and caught it. “There,” she said. She handed it back to me. I tried to do the same but the ball bounced off my fingers and rolled away. The girl picked it up and showed me again. “Here,” she said, “keep your hand open when you try to catch it.” The ball bounced off my palm instead. She handed it back to me. “You'll get the hang of it,” she said. “Just practice.” I held the wiffle ball in my hand as we drove the last load of stuff into my new home.

It was sunny outside. I only know that it was the eve of a hurricane because of stories I've been told since. I followed my mother and father into our new house. It was empty and smelled musty and un-lived in. My mother started cleaning the bathroom downstairs. It was filled with mold.

I went outside and lay on my back. Our fenced in yard was filled with large maple trees. I looked up at the blue sky through all the leaves. It was breezy and they rustled back and forth. I decided I loved my new home.

I went back inside and looked over my mom's shoulders. She had finished cleaning the bathroom and was now scrubbing out the inside of the oven. She wore rubber gloves. “Get back,” she said. “This stuff will burn if it gets on your skin.” I stood a few paces back and watched her. My grandma held my younger brother in her arms and walked back and forth. My father and grandfather carried in furniture. A few days after we moved in I looked for the wiffle ball I had been given. It was lost and I never found it.

The farmhouse, I found out later in a course I took on architecture, was laid out very traditionally. A hallway and staircase divided the house in half. Two large rooms were on either side of the hallway on both floors. It was built in the decade prior to the Civil War without indoor plumbing. As a result, when plumbing was added later, the bathrooms were a little strange. The first floor bathroom cut one of the four large rooms in half, leaving a room too small to do much with. It became a playroom while I was young, and later, when my father wrote his thesis, it became an office. Upstairs, our bathroom and three bedrooms were all the same size.

At the top of the stairs there was a large walk-in closet where my parents hung their “grown-up” clothes. To the left my father kept his corduroy suits that I thought were hideous, ties, and brown loafers with tassels. He wore them to the middle school where he taught English. On the right side of the closet my mother kept her old clothes: dresses and high heels that she rarely wore, and sweaters with horizontal stripes left over from college that I only saw her wear in photos taken before I was born. On the closet door, reflecting the staircase and the second story hallway, there was a full length mirror that my father stood in front of straightening his tie and combing his hair before going to work. I stood beside him with a little comb of my own and parted my hair to the right. I had a blue birthmark just behind my bangs, the same color as the eyeshadow that the pretty teenage girls at my dad's school wore. I admired it in the mirror often because I was still too young for make-up. During the day, while my dad was at work, I played dress-up and practiced walking around in my mother's heels. I looked forward to growing into them some day.

Once, I played dress-up with my brother Alex. I showed him our parents' clothes hung in the closet: my dad's ugly brown and green suits and the tassels on his shoes, my mothers clothes and her shoes with high heels. I put on a pair and started walking around. He put on a pair of my dad's shoes. They were much bigger than our mother's. He put on one of my dad's dress shirts. It hung to his ankles.

“No,” I said. “You're doing it all wrong!”

My friends were all children of my father's co-workers at the school. Katie was my best friend. She had a younger brother, Charlie, who was the same age as Alex and they'd play together anytime he came over. Her parents had a station wagon with wood grain on the side and a trunk that converted into a second back seat. The year before we started preschool our mothers decided that they were going to take us on field trips during the day while our fathers worked. Our brothers would be strapped into car seats and we'd ride in the converted back seat, looking out the back window as scenery vanished into the distance.

Once we rode on a ferry. “You know what a ferry is?” her mom asked.

“Like Tinkerbell?” I volunteered. I'd just watched Peter Pan the night before.

“No, a boat!” said Katie.

“It's a boat,” her mom said, “that cars ride on.”

“See!” said Katie.

“Tinkerbell is a fairy too, but a different type of fairy,” my mom said.

“See!” I said.

Katie, my two other friends Paul and John, and I would play together, catching lightning bugs in the backyard and watching animated movies until late when our parents would take us home and put us to bed. One evening, while our parents were talking, we stacked all my toys in the doorway of the play room, making a dam. When we finished, we climbed over the dam into the hallway. “Let's play wedding!” Katie said. She decided she wanted to marry John.

“Why don't you want to marry me?” I asked.

“I can only marry a boy. You're not a real boy,” she paused. “You can be the minister.” She suggested.

My youngest brother, Jack, was born during a snowstorm in November. Once again, I had wanted a sister. Alex and I stayed at my grandparents' house. They lived in a cottage by mouth of the Yeocomico River, where it met the Potomac. My brother and I walked through the snow by the river with our grandmother. “Are you excited to meet your baby brother?” she asked us.

Almost from the moment he was born, Jack liked balls and guns. On long car trips, he'd sit in his car seat between Alex and me, clutching a baseball. I'd make him hats out of yarn and place them on his head. He was blonde.

Another hurricane postponed my first day of kindergarten. Alex and I shared a bunk bed that Dad had built with two by fours and plywood. I had the top bunk. Jack slept in a crib in the corner of the room. It was dark outside when Mom tucked us into bed. She gave us flashlights, large square yellow flashlights with colored filters that could be adjusted to make the light green, red, or yellow. “Keep these near you,” she said, “in case we have to leave and go to the middle school.” The middle school gym had been made into a shelter. My dad was there, helping to keep it organized. They had evacuated Tangier Island and people said it might not be there in the morning.

“Are we going to be okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said my mom. “We'll leave if it starts to get bad.”

“Will the house be okay?”

“This house is old,” my mom said, “it's been through a lot of hurricanes worse than this. It was built well.”

It was dark that night, but I don't think we ever lost power. I stayed awake in bed for a while, shining my flashlight on the ceiling and switching its color between red, green, and yellow before I finally fell asleep. Mom didn't wake us in the middle of the night, and in the morning, on what would have been my first day of school, we slept in. The hurricane never hit. That afternoon was clear but gusty. On TV I watched a documentary about Pompeii, but the stone figures that were once human scared me so I went outside.

On a Sunday night, the last weekend before I'd start the first grade, my brothers and I lay in the spare bedroom bed with our mother, Jack in her arms, and Alex and I sitting beside her. Outside the sun was setting. We watched The Wind and the Willows on television, (or perhaps my mother read it to us; I don't remember having a second TV). Alex and Jack fell asleep, but I was still awake when it finished and we took the car to go pick up my father from his second job. He worked weekends at a bar called The Boathouse.

The Boathouse started as a snack bar and bait shop for a campground and most of its regulars were still campers. Once it had been an actual boathouse. It stood mostly above the water, only the kitchen was on land. A large pier ran alongside and past it into the river, where people docked their boats. It was run by a man who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and his wife. He'd started as a dishwasher in Richmond, and then he worked as a cook for a while, and finally as a bartender at an after hours club, before he mixed a good drink for someone who offered to let him run a campground in the Northern Neck. He was a large man, with a big belly and a couple missing teeth, who could tell a story like few others. During dinner he ran the kitchen which served fried fish, crab-cakes, pizza, and burgers. After dinner he sat at a table in the bar and told fishing stories to any who would listen. He usually entertained a large audience.

When we got to the bar they had just finished a bottle of Mescal and a waitress was eating the worm. One of the regulars, a boat captain, always had a pocket full of balloons. He blew one up and made a poodle with it. Then he gave it to me. We waited while my dad finished pouring drinks, wiping the bar, and putting away glasses. He stood behind the bar, pouring shots for the chain smoking waitresses; restaurant people smoke and drink. When he got off, I sat in his lap while he drank a beer. He smelled like a bartender, of cigarettes, booze and sanitizer. We got home late at night. My brothers were still asleep when we were put to bed.

Some afternoons, I rode the school bus home with Katie and we played in her tree house. Alex would already be there with Charlie, playing games that didn't look like much fun. We as older siblings thought their games too childish for us. Occasionally, we'd let them play house with us, giving them chores, usually outside, to do. We pretended to be grown up. We pretended to bake cookies and brownies, or help each other put away groceries and clean, things our mothers seldom did together After a few minutes Alex and Charlie would get bored with our game and go back to playing whatever it was they played. Our mothers sat on the patio furniture and watched us play.

When house got boring we'd play with the little figures that came in Legos: cops, truck drivers, and firemen. We liked the cops because they were girls. It was the eighties, and both of our mothers had drilled into us that a woman could be anything that a man could be.

Alex and Charlie were playing with dirt, and Katie's mother was inside making us lemonade. My mom stood watching us and holding my youngest brother Jack. I ran over to her. “Mommy,” I said tugging her arm, “I decided what I want to be when I grow up!”

“Oh that's great!” she said.

“I want to be a mommy like you,” I said.

“You don't want to be a daddy?” she asked. “You can be a daddy.”

I thought about my dad, and the ugly corduroy suits he wore to school. I didn't want to be like him. “No,” I said, “I want to be like you. I want to be a mommy.”

“Well, you can be a daddy.” she said. “Daddies are the same thing as mommies except that they're boys.”

“I thought that girls and boys could grow up to be anything they want. Like girls can be police officers and fire-women.”

“That's true,” she agreed, “but they're still girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas.” Her reasoning sounded so obvious that I was ashamed that I hadn't thought of it before. “Do you want to be a daddy?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. “You wanted to be a mommy.”

“They're not the same.”

There's a picture of my family around that time. My mother dressed Alex and me in sailor suits. We wore white shorts and sailor hats, and had matching blue and white striped shirts. I hated dressing like my brother. Alex and I stood in front of our parents. My mother was seated holding my youngest brother Jack. She had a perm and looked too thin. I held up the hem of my right leg because I didn't feel comfortable. When the shoot was over I gave my mom the sailor hat. I didn't want to be a sailor. The photo hung on the wall of my parents' dining room, with other family photos, my senior picture, and baby pictures of my brothers and I until a few years ago.

Sometime after I told my mom that I wanted to grow up to be a mommy, my parents decided they were going to teach me how to shower. There was a new shower head, that Katie's parents had installed at their house, that was attached to a hose. It mounted to the wall in a bracket and could be removed to spray various parts of one's body. Katie stood in the bathtub and demonstrated how it worked. She held her head back so that her hair wouldn't fall in her eyes and washed her hair. It was the first time I saw a girl my age naked. My dad installed a similar shower head in our bathroom, and I started showering by myself. I didn't want to be seen naked anymore.

The next day I sat on the toilet in the big bathroom at home. It was on the second floor and we had no neighbors, so there were no curtains on the windows. The window beside me was blocked by a large maple tree. I could see sky out the other window, which looked down on the area where my parents parked. The door was latched closed. I sat on the toilet examining my penis. It seemed rather unnecessary. I pushed it inside my body cavity hoping it would stay there, but it didn't. That settled things. “Boys have penises,” I said out loud, “and girls have vaginas.” From the vent in the floor a few feet away I heard people talking and realized Katie had come over with her mother and brother. I hoped that I hadn't been heard and was embarrassed.

Chapter 2

When I was a small child my parents woke my brothers and me and packed us in the back of their brand new 1987 Nissan Sentra with pillows, blankets, and a coloring book of deep sea creatures. We drove fourteen hours to Ithaca, in northern Indiana where Mom grew up. My mother read to us from Little House on the Prairie until she could read no more, and fell asleep. Then I occupied myself by asking about the weird fish in the coloring book, fish with needle teeth and glowing orbs. My brother Alex poked me at intervals until I became mad and Dad smacked me from the front seat for losing my temper. This continued for the rest of the car ride. I tried to imagine myself in the deep ocean but found I couldn’t. I decided I was glad fish like that only lived deep in the ocean and I decided I was glad that I wasn’t a deep sea fish.

My maternal grandparents lived in Ithaca, the small town where my mom’s family had lived for generations. Grandma’s house meant Tang, sugary cereal, candy, and other treats we didn’t have at home. Visiting meant the smell of coffee and bacon in the morning, playing with cousins and second cousins, eating hamburgers, hotdogs, and potato salad, if it was summer, or ham, turkey, and cookies at Christmas. Whatever the time of the year, it meant lots of good hearty Midwestern food. My grandmother had two kitchens.

When we arrived it was well after my bedtime and it was dark outside. My grandpa was sitting against the wall, at the kitchen table. Beside him sat my great-grandmother, his mother, who was famous for her pies, and across the table from him sat my grandmother with a white eye patch taped under her glasses; she had just had cataract surgery. We had been warned about her eye patch during the ride, but I was still shocked when I saw it. I'd expected a pirate's eye patch. It didn't make her look as different as I'd imagined. Grandma served us pie that my great-grandma had brought and poured coffee for my parents. Alex and I sat on the carpeted steps which led from the dining room into the kitchen and ate our pie. We let the grown-ups do the talking. My brother and I went to bed shortly after eating, and shared a bed in the room my mother once shared with her sister. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the air outside. It was comfortable. Summers in Northern Indiana aren't blazing hot like summers in Virginia can be.

When I asked, my grandma gave me a Fudgesicle. I wasn’t allowed to eat it inside, “Now eat this outside,” I'd been told, “Little boys are too messy to eat Fudgesicles inside,” so I sat outside on the steps in front of her house and tried to eat it before it dripped down my hand and onto my arm. I tried extra hard to be clean, but it was a hot day and the Fudgesicle was too cold to eat really fast. I sat on the door step wondering what my life would be like if I had been born a girl. “I’d be eating this inside and wouldn’t be getting so sticky with fudge drippings” I thought. I licked what was left of the frozen chocolate off the Popsicle stick and walked inside to clean up.

When I said I didn't feel like coloring Grandma asked me if I wanted to see my uncle's artwork. I agreed and I followed her upstairs into his bedroom. “He’s going to school for art down in Terra Haute,” she said as she pulled out a folder of drawings he had done. “I’ll leave you up here and let you look at them for a while. Be careful with them, and don’t get them dirty.” My grandma left and I flipped through drawings of gumball machines until I thought I’d spent enough time to show I was interested. Then I went downstairs and asked for a glass of Tang, and talked with her for a while.

My last memory of my family before my mother's nervous breakdown was at a carnival. It was late August, and the sun had set. The air smelled like funnel cakes and cotton candy. My dad had a string of tickets to spend on games and rides. We rode the Ferris wheel, the swings, and the spider, a machine with eight legs and sixteen baskets that dipped and spun us around. The spider made me nervous. I was worried our bucket would come loose and we'd be thrown into the sky, over the people waiting in line. They weren't going to be able to ride. Then again, they probably wouldn't want to after seeing my dad and I hurled through space. Dad assured me that wouldn't happen but I clutched the guard rail tightly with both hands until the ride was over. Then we walked around eating cotton candy and met my mother and younger brother at a picnic table with crab-cake sandwiches and fries. We left after eating and I was asleep by the time we got home. I woke while my father carried me upstairs. He tucked me into bed and I fell back asleep.

I never realized at the time that my mother was ill. My father didn't either. A police officer had to tell him one rainy Sunday morning. Our family was on the way to church in our '87 Nissan Sentra. I sat behind my mother on the passenger side. Alex sat behind my father who was driving, and Jack sat in a car seat between us. He was still an infant. I looked out at the gray sky and rain water as it beaded and ran down my window. Blue lights flashed behind us and Dad pulled over, but Mom wanted to talk to the priest. She urged my him to keep driving. “No,” he said, “I'm not going to run from the cops.” The officer tapped on my dad's window, and he rolled it down.

“License and registration,” the cop said.

“Go!” said my mom. The police officer looked through the car at her. He shined a flashlight in her face. “Anything in here I need to know about?”

“No.” said Dad. The officer left with my dad's license and sat in his car.

“Go!” said my mother again.

“I can't go,” said Dad, “He has my license.”

After a while the police officer came back. “Can I talk to you outside?” He asked. Dad stepped out of the car and they talked together under a black umbrella. The police officer told my father to get Mom to a hospital. It was obvious she needed it.

I have been told since that my mother had a couple nervous breakdowns and that my brothers and I stayed my my grandparents while she was in the hospital. I remember spending weeks sleeping at Katie's house, or at Paul's house. I also remember waking up with chickenpox at my grandparents' and missing the church Christmas Pageant. I was supposed to be Joseph. I guess both memories are true.

I don't know what grade I was in, probably the first because my brothers were staying with my grandparents, and I couldn't miss school. My dad stood with Katie's parents in the hallway talking. I watched them from the kitchen, but didn't hear what they said. It was a small kitchen: smaller, anyway, than the kitchen back at home, but it was newer, and more stylish. The floor was dark brown linoleum, and the cabinets were stained to match. It was open, no wall stood between the kitchen and the hallway. It was actually one large room with the kitchen taking up the corner, only distinguished by its hard floor and an island that stood between me and my father. After a few minutes he came over to me and kneeled down so we were face to face.

“Your Mommy,” he said, “is really sick. She has to stay in the hospital, but she'll get better. It's just going to take a little while.”

“Okay.” I said.

“You didn't do anything wrong. Mommy has a mental illness. Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. “Kinda,” I said. I'd heard the grown-ups talking about it earlier.

“It means her mind is sick. She isn't thinking rationally right now. She believes things that aren't true. Everyone else knows that they're not true but she doesn't. We didn't notice at first, and she didn't know. When someone is mentally ill they don't always know. It's made her really sick and she has to stay in a special hospital until she gets better. Okay?”

I nodded.

Dad continued, “Her hospital is in Norfolk. I'm going to visit her in the afternoons when I finish teaching and I need to work more at the Boathouse. I will be getting home really late every night and I can't watch you. Will you be okay spending the night here during the week until I can bring her home?”

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said and hugged me, “You be good. I'll see you as much as I can. I'll be back for you on Friday when I get home from work.” He hugged me for a little longer. “I need you to be strong. Your Mom and I love you.” He stood up and left. It was a Monday night.

I stood by myself in the kitchen. It was a scary thought that I could be really sick and not even know it, that I could believe something that everyone else knew was wrong. I vowed never to let myself believe something that I couldn't prove was true.

I examined my thoughts. I knew that girls have vaginas and boys have penises. There was nothing to justify my belief that I should be a girl. It was time to learn how to be a boy.

At Katie's house I slept on a fold-out sleeper sofa in a room her parents called the den. It was a small room with light blue carpeting. A large television stood at the foot of my bed. It had a VCR, and one night Katie and I watched American Tail. One of my teeth became loose and I wiggled it for a couple days until it fell out. I asked Katie's mother if the tooth fairy would know I wasn't sleeping at home, and held my palm open to show her the tooth.

“She'll know,” she said, “put it under your pillow when you sleep tonight.”

The next morning I woke with my dad asleep beside me. It was Saturday and he was still wearing his uniform from the night before. He still smelled like a bartender. I got out of bed and ran into the kitchen where Katie's mom was cooking breakfast. “My daddy's here!” I said. “The tooth fairy brought my daddy! See.” I took her arm and led her back to the den. My father met us halfway and picked me up. He gave me a hug.

“Did the tooth fairy leave you anything last night?” he asked. I pushed myself back so I could look at him. “Did you check under your pillow?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “She brought you.”

“I came after I got off work. I think you should check under your pillow, she might have brought you something else.” He set me down on the floor, and I ran back to the bed and lifted up the pillow. A dollar bill was resting where my tooth had been.

Late that night my father picked me up from Katie's house when he finished working at the bar and I slept in my own bed. Our house felt strange, empty, and dark without my mother or younger brothers. It felt different. I don't know if it was ever the same again.

On Christmas I woke up at my grandparents' house by the Yeocomico. We ate cinnamon rolls that my Dad's father made and waited for my parents. Dad was picking my mom up from the hospital in Norfolk. She was was well enough to come home for the day, but she was still sick, and wouldn't stay at home yet. We had finished eating when my parents arrived. Alex and I hugged Mom's legs, and Grandma handed her my brother Jack. She sat in a folding chair in the middle of the finished porch and held him. Alex and I opened our Christmas presents at her feet. I don't remember what I was given that year. Alex got a toy truck, and Jack, Duplos, the giant, toddler-safe version of Legos. He got two identical sets. Mom forgot she had already bought one when she told my father what to buy and where to hide them. He found the first set when he hid the second. She wouldn't let him return it.

For years I've remembered her nervous breakdown as I've described it, one event. I've learned since that she was hospitalized different times. This explains many of the conflicting memories I have. For example, my kindergarten teacher and my mother were close friends before her nervous breakdown. My brother Alex, who started school the same year I started the second grade was placed in her class at my mother's insistence, but their friendship didn't survive the illness, and by the time Mom was released from the hospital for good they were no longer on speaking terms. My parents' relationships with their other friends changed as well. When I started the third grade I rarely saw Katie, John, or Paul anymore.

It is difficult for me to explain my emotions in the years following my mother's nervous breakdown. I knew that her mental illness was not her fault, but I was resentful of her as I never was before. My father also had a strained relationship with her at that time. They fought frequently and I'd hear them yelling through the air vent in the floor of my bedroom. For a while my father was unpredictable and I didn't always know what would set him off. If I cried he would yell and accuse me of being manipulative. I learned to hold back tears. He was also very defensive of my mother. If I spoke back to her, he would go into a rage and smack me with the back of his hand. He wore a class ring and the stone hurt when it hit the side of my head. I asked him to take it off before hitting me. He mostly obliged.

When my mother returned home, she began seeing a psychiatrist. My brothers and I saw the psychiatrist also, though not regularly. I only remember seeing her once, at a session my father sat in on as well. My brothers stayed in the lobby under the supervision of the receptionist and played with toys while my parents and I talked. The therapist wanted to know why I hated my father. I said his temper, and I said his rules weren't fair. He'd asked me to be strong when I spent weeks away from home and I was. I wasn't the same as my younger brothers and didn't want to be treated the same.

I believed that my mother became mentally ill because she allowed herself to believe things that couldn't be true. She needed her psychiatrist to help her distinguish reality from delusion. I decided I was never going to have a nervous breakdown. I would examine and analyze all my thoughts and only believe what I could prove to be true, and only want things I could actually have. I still wanted to be a girl. That night I was determined to find out why so I could dismiss it.

I went to bed an hour after my brothers, part of the deal my parents and I made with my mother's therapist. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. I thought about all the girls who’d been my friends. I liked girls. I really liked girls. That was “normal.” I was “normal.” I just really liked girls. In fact, I reasoned, I was probably in love, just scared to admit it. I decided that being in love, however embarrassing, was much more realistic than wanting to be a girl. Falling in love was something that was actually supposed to happen. I tried to figure out who I was in love with. I finally settled on a pretty blonde girl in my class who was “art talented” also. I slept peacefully until morning.

That fall, my mother returned to school to work on her Master's degree in music composition. She partially blamed her illness on not having worked as a musician, or continuing her education. She used the spare bedroom as a music studio and taught private lessons. She spent a couple days a week in Richmond taking classes and collaborating on projects with other grad students at VCU. Her favorite professor was an old woman named Nika with a hunched back and dark, unnaturally dyed, hair. Nika was also certifiably a genius who earned her PhD at age twelve. She also played guitar in a death metal band called Capital Punishment, collected shot glasses, and lived with four cats. We took her to The Boathouse one evening for drinks and dinner. She ate half a crab-cake and drank six beers, then spent the night on our couch. We drove her home the next day.

When I was eleven I learned that my uncle whose drawings I'd flipped through as a child was gay. “He falls in love with other men instead of women,” my mother explained, “but that doesn’t mean that he wants to be a girl.” My heart skipped a beat, and my mother continued. “You might grow up and find out that you’re gay, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I don’t want to be a girl,” I told myself, “I thought I did once, but I don’t. I just really like girls, and that’s normal. God, I hope I don’t find out I’m gay.”

A major ice-storm hit the east coast that year. My father had quit teaching middle school English to sell insurance, then went six months with little to no income, and took a job selling beef door to door. Selling insurance, he'd had an office, wore a nice suit that wasn't made of corduroy, and carried a laptop we could plug a telephone line into and get on the internet. It was more glamorous than selling wholesale meat. Now he wore jeans and rode around in a refrigerated truck. “You like steak?” he'd ask whenever someone answered their door. “Well I have a deal for you!” Ideally the customer would buy months' worth of steak and my father would make a profit. He worked from early in the morning until late at night driving the back roads of Virginia from Charlottesville to the Northern Neck.

It was dark when the ice storm hit. Dad was miles from anything and had run out of gas. He kept his flashers on until they drained his battery, but no one had passed by for hours. He didn't want to risk walking to a gas-station in the dark without a flashlight in the freezing rain. As he lay across the bench seat and prepared himself for a long cold night, an Amway salesman knocked on his window, and asked if he could help.

“I'm out of gas and money,” Dad said, “and I'm trying to get home to my wife and children.”

The Amway salesman took my father to his home, fed him dinner, and let him shower. Then he bought gas and jump-started the meat truck. I was in already in bed by the time Dad came home. When he told us later about the Amway salesman he said it reminded him of the parable of the good Samaritan. “An Amway salesman,” he said. “The only person who stopped was an Amway salesman.”

The next morning everything was covered with ice and our mile long driveway was impassible. It would be several weeks before we had power again, so we flushed the toilets with water from the creek and cooked over a campfire. At night Dad read to us from the Unabridged Works of Edgar Allen Poe by gas lantern. We ate steak for dinner to the sound of melting ice.

The day before my brothers and I finally returned to school we bathed outside in icy water from a hose that we had to pump out of the ground by hand. “Okay,” Dad said when he sprayed us off. “You gotta learn to be tough. This is going to be cold.” We scrubbed ourselves with soap as quickly as we could then he sprayed us with the icy water again and wrapped us in a towel. It felt good to be clean.

Chapter 3

“I can always tell when someone is gay” my friend Tom told me. We were biking to the elementary school a few miles away. It was the school we had both attended. Now we were in the sixth grade and went to middle school. Instead of hallways the elementary school had sidewalks. In the evenings, after all the teachers had gone home, we rode our bikes through the school and jumped off ramps.

“No you can’t,” I said. “How can you tell?”

“They’re just…different,” he said. “I saw one in McDonald's one time. He was wearing pink tights and a purple shirt. 'Don't knock it till you try it' he told me, disgusting! He was carrying a purse!”

“I don’t believe you. My uncle’s gay. Could you tell? He's not like that.”

“Yeah,” he said, “he wasn’t as obvious as most, but I could still tell.”

“How?” I asked

“He blinged on my gaydar.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s how you tell if someone is gay or not. Everyone has one…except gay people I guess.”

“I don’t think I have one. I didn’t notice anything and I’m not gay.”

“Maybe you get your gaydar in puberty. I don’t think I could tell if someone was gay a few years ago, but now I can. You’ll get one soon I’m sure.”

I looked at Tom. He was a little more muscular than I was but my voice was lower and he almost a year younger than me. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, I mean unless you’re gay. I mean maybe when I first met you, you blinged a little on my gaydar, but then I got to know you.”

“I blinged on your gaydar?”

“A little but not much, and now you don’t. It might have been a mistake. They aren’t perfect. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I learned about all the things that no one really talked about during school from Tom, or on the school bus. The school bus was where kids would exchange cigarettes, and occasionally condoms, with whispers. We felt grown up. It was nothing like riding the bus to elementary school. In the mornings, my dad would wait with me in his pick-up truck for the bus to arrive. He now managed a shop that made expansion joints for industrial duct work. He still wore jeans and t-shirts to work, but his truck wasn't refrigerated. Inside it smelled like silicone and pipe tobacco.

Only a handful of kids caught the bus as early in the morning as I did. It was mostly empty for the first forty-five minutes in the morning and the last forty-five minutes in the afternoon. Those of us who did catch the bus early formed a breakfast club of sorts. Tom lived a couple of miles away from me and was picked up right after me. We'd first met in the third grade, when he was a new kid. He'd just moved to the Northern Neck from New Jersey, and, unlike most of the other boys my age, he liked girls too. Frequently I got off at his house (or he at mine) and we'd spend the afternoon together riding bikes, talking about girls, and devising schemes to make ourselves popular.

He lived with his mother and grandparents in a one bedroom house. It smelled of southern cooking, cigarettes, and canned cat food. Surprisingly, it wasn't an entirely unpleasant smell. He slept in a semi-finished attic. It had dry wall and carpeting, but it could only be entered through a trap door. We could use the pull-down ladder to climb into his room, but that involved folding up the sleeper sofa in the living room where his mom slept, so we usually stood on an end table and jumped. We didn't spend a lot of time in his room. Most of the time, unless it was either too cold or too hot, we'd hang out behind an old chicken coop in his yard, or with his aunt, who lived in a double wide trailer next door.

Also riding the bus with us was a girl named Annie. She lived next door to the bus driver and rode alone with her for about half an hour before I got on. She called me “J Dogg,” and sat beside me, and sometimes on my lap. She wore cut-off shorts that violated the school dress code, and t-shirts that rode up and exposed her belly. When her breasts grew over the summer between sixth and seventh grade, she cut the collar with a pair of scissors to give herself more room. I thought she was trashy and smelled bad. I didn't like her sitting beside me, but there wasn't much I could do about it, especially on days Tom stayed after school for soccer or some other sport that I didn't play.

“Hey,” she said one afternoon, and grabbed my hand, “take your middle finger and push it as far as you can towards your wrist.” She measured the difference between where my finger touched the bottom of my palm and its tip. “Oh,” she said, “you have a really little penis.” She said it like she knew what she was talking about, and I didn't doubt that she did.

“How would you know?” I asked.

“Because I just measured,” she said.

“From my middle finger? I'm bigger than that.”

She reached her hand into my pants, grabbed me, and sat closer. “I bet you masturbate a lot,” she said.

According to the boys on the bus, masturbation was something that involved Vaseline or lotion, and stroking and jerking the shaft of my penis. It was something I did not do. I suspected that maybe a couple of the boys on the bus did. They seemed to know an awful lot about it. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about. It was better to keep my mouth shut when people said I masturbated, and let them whisper behind my back. I saw what happened to people who tried to argue their way out rumors. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me, and anyway, I didn’t masturbate. Someone asked me if I did once. He explained what masturbation was. It didn't sound like something I'd enjoy. My face turned red and I told him that I didn't. He looked back at me obviously disbelieving. “Then what do you do?’ he asked.

I didn't know what to say. I was sure what I did was far worse, not something I wanted people to know. “I don’t do anything,” I said. “I’m not a pervert.” He looked at me visibly hurt, and didn't pressure me anymore.

The horrible thing that I did, which I had just decided I needed to stop doing, was something I did in private, I tucked. The goal of tucking was to secure my penis between my legs well enough so that when I put a pair of panties on, my pubescent body looked female. I had devoted hours of time devising different methods to keep it as secure as possible. The ultimate end would have been to make it look like a vagina without having to cover myself with anything, but so far I'd only made homemade gaffs and discovered that once everything was tucked securely in place and covered with padding, it felt good to apply pressure where I imagined my vagina to be. This was not masturbation by the definition I knew, but I was sure it was probably much worse. When people asked me about masturbating this was the first thing I thought of.

Annie looked at me, waiting for a reply. “No, I don't,” I said.

“Yeah you do,” she responded. “I'm psychic. I know. Look, you're getting all red.” She yelled so everyone could hear, “Jonathan said he masturbates!”

“No I don't!” I said.

“Look at him,” she yelled, “he's all red.”

“Yeah, you do,” someone said. “Don't lie, we can tell you're lying”

I moved away from Annie and looked out the window.

“J dog,” she said, and moved closer. I didn't answer. “J dog,” she repeated, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to tell everyone.”

“Why are you even sitting next to me?” I asked. “I don't like you.”

“Why?” she asked. When I didn't respond she asked again, “Why?”

“You're mean, you're ugly, and you smell like ammonia and fish.” She punched me, moved to a different seat and looked out a window herself. After a while I started to feel guilty and tried to apologize, but she wouldn't talk to me.

“Good,” I thought, but I stared out the window thinking about how much of a freak I was. When I got home I had the house to myself. My mother was at her studio, an office she rented, and my brothers were still at school. When Mom moved her instruments into her new studio, I'd taken her room. It had a full length mirror and a latch on the door. I went into my room and sat on the floor with a Swiss Army knife that I kept sharp as a razor. I ran it up and down the vein in my wrist and thought about cutting. “No,” I decided, “it might hurt.”

The next morning Annie sat by me. “Do you still think I smell bad?” she asked. Her hair was wet and she smelled like shampoo. She'd painted her nails and gotten polish all over her fingers.

“No,” I said, “I didn't mean to say you smelled bad.”

“You like this color?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you want to wear some?” I looked into her face to make sure it wasn't some sort of trap to start another rumor about me being gay. “I won't put makeup on you or anything. It's not a really feminine color. No one will make fun of you. I promise. Cross my heart. I'll hurt them if they do.”

“Are you going to get it all over my hands?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I'll do a good job. It'll look good.”

“Okay,” I said and rolled my eyes, “Whatever.” Secretly, however, I was a little excited about wearing nail polish. Annie was nice to me the rest of the way to school and we talked while she painted my nails.

When I got to school I scraped the nail polish off using my teeth, careful to remove every last remnant of color. My nails were clean when I rode home. “You took your nail polish off,” Annie said. “How'd you get it off?”

I told her, and didn't let her put any more on. “I don't want my parents to see.” I said, “I don't think they'd be mad, but I just don't want them to see me with nail polish on. It would be embarrassing. You can paint them again some other time.”

“Okay,” she said, and smiled.

Kindle Edition US

Kindle Edition UK (on sale until October 29, 2014)